Social Media: Usage and Impact

Citation

Stuart, D. (2013), "Social Media: Usage and Impact", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 3, pp. 486-487. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2013-0092

Social media is now firmly embedded in many areas of people's personal and professional lives, from providing forums in schools and backchannels at conferences to providing advertising platforms for corporations and a medium for customers to provide feedback. Social media is a mammoth topic raising many important practical and theoretical issues, and Social Media: Usage and Impact attempts to provide a comprehensive and scholarly analysis of the subject.

This is an edited collection of 16 chapters in five parts: Social Media and Social Networking, Social Media and Education, Social Media and Strategic Communications (i.e., PR and marketing), Social Media and Politics, Social Media and Legal/Ethical Issues. It consists of original qualitative and quantitative research into the use of social media in different environments and some of the issues that arise. Whilst other countries and technologies are mentioned, it is nonetheless dominated by studies that focus on the USA, Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media: Usage and Impact suffers from both the deficiencies many of the books on social media, as well as those of edited books more generally. Social media includes an extremely broad set of tools used by a multitude of different people in different ways, and no single book can expect to cover such a topic comprehensively at the micro level. The result is a book which is inevitably disjointed. Any one of the five parts, or any of the main technologies, is undoubtedly a topic worthy of a book in its own right.

There is also the problem of the dominance of the most popular technologies. Whilst one author notes that “there are literally thousands of social media tools available” (p. 122), most of the research focuses on Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, it is the more obscure social media services, such as the mixtape site www.datpiff.com, that are particularly interesting, because they have not already been discussed as extensively elsewhere.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this book, but it is hard to identify a niche for it. An institution's journal subscriptions are likely to already provide access to some of the many papers that have been written on Facebook and Twitter, and those who specifically want a book on a social media topic are likely to be better served by something more focused.